Rudolf Hoess

Rudolf Hoess (25 November 1901-16 April 1947) was an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer of Nazi Germany who was the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland during the Holocaust.

Biography
Rudolf Hoess was born on 25 November 1901 in Baden-Baden, Wurttemberg, German Empire to a strict Catholic family. Hoess grew up as a loner whose only friends were adults, and he was brought up on strict religious principles and with military discipline. Hoess was wounded three times in World War I in the Middle East while serving with the Imperial German Army and their Ottoman allies, and he joined the Freikorps in their campaign against the Soviet Union in the Baltics, Polish nationalists in the Silesian Uprisings, and communists in the Ruhr. In 1922, he joined the Nazi Party as its 2,740th member after hearing Adolf Hitler's speech in Munich, and he murdered German Volkisch Freedom Party-affiliated schoolteacher Walther Kadow on 31 May 1923, for which he was jailed. In 1934, he joined the SS. On 1 May 1940, he was given command of the Auschwitz concentration camp in the Upper Silesia region of Poland, and he expanded the original facility to a sprawling complex that would see the deaths of 1,100,000 Jews, Poles, Romani, "asocials", communists, and other political dissidents, and on 3 September 1941 he began mass killings instead of forced labor. At the end of World War II, Hoess disguised himself as a gardener and evaded arrest until 11 March 1946, when Nazi hunter Hanns Alexander tracked him down and handed him over to the Allies. He was executed by hanging in 1947.